The Sickopath

Brutal rape in Delhi exposes the rise of sexual violence

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A five-year-old is fighting for life at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Delhi. Grievously injured, she lives to see another day. A thousand kilometres away, in Nagpur, another four-year-old is lying in a coma in a hospital Intensive Care Unit. She lies tethered to a ventilator, with a broken body and serious brain injury. Raped brutally on April 15 and 17, respectively, their little lives have rocked the nation and raised a painful question: Is this no country for children?

Beware the dark underbelly of a nation in transition. Coming out of the woodwork is a shadowy figure, a predator who weaves perverse sexual fantasies on easy prey, children. He is not just any criminal. Nor is he yet another rapist. He is more of a next-door neighbour, a relative or a family friend, who looks perfectly normal until the day he decides to strike.

Both the child victims knew their rapists: Manoj Kumar Sah, 22, a garment factory labourer, lived in the same East Delhi tenement as the five-year-old Gudiya (name changed); Firoz Khan, the 35-year-old welder who raped the four-year-old, knew her family well. Playing on that familiarity, it took just a bar of chocolate for both the men to lure the children to a lonely spot. The story of the child rapist is the real horror story of India.

The cases have set off a new furore. Four months after the fatal gang rape of a 23-year-old in a Delhi bus sparked outrage across India, the nation has once again taken to the streets to protest heinous sexual assaults on children. Hundreds are shouting slogans, campaigning outside government buildings, scuffling with policemen. Just a month ago, Parliament passed the Criminal Law (Amendment) Bill, 2013, laying down stringent punishment for crimes against women, even death. But the threat of death penalty has not deterred criminals. And now the Government is increasingly a helpless bystander.

Across India, childhood is at risk. Just consider 2013: In February, a six-year-old girl was found crying in a pool of blood in Gurgaon late one night. Just a few hours before, she was playing outside her home. Then someone saw her walking with a young man, possibly someone she knew. To doctors at Safdarjung Hospital, Delhi, the severe injuries to her genitals and lower intestines indicated multiple rapists. In March, a teenager in Jaipur, Rajasthan, was picked up by her teacher on the pretext of visiting a temple. He took her to a friend's home and raped her. In April, a young man was arrested in Hyderabad for attempting to rape his nine-year-old cousin.

One in three rape victims in India is a child. According to a recently published report by the Delhi-based Asian Centre for Human Rights, there has been a 336 per cent jump in child rape cases between 2001 and 2011 in India, totalling 48,338 in a decade. The National Crime Records Bureau reports highest number of child rapes from Madhya Pradesh, followed by Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Delhi.

"This is just the tip of the iceberg," says Madhu Kishwar, rights activist and publisher of feminist mouthpiece, Manushi. "There is no credible data on child sexual abuse in India. Often the police do not register the cases. And many rape cases go unreported because of the social stigma attached."

Manoj Kumar Sah, accused of raping a five-year-old in Delhi, in police custody.

Is there a profile of a typical child rapist? "A child sex abuser is a different entity from other rapists and non-sexual criminals," says Dr Manju Mehta, professor and head of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Clinic and Clinical Psychology at AIIMS. Child rapes, in her experience, are committed by people who have a very specific psychopathogy: A fixation for children. "It's a type of personality disorder where the black holes in their psychological make-up create perversions that feed on sexual exploitation of children," she says. One hallmark of such personalities is a deep-rooted inferiority, she explains. Unlike other rapists and non-sexual criminals, they usually have "avoidant personalities"-extremely sensitive to criticism, filled with self-loathing, and need for approval. "They are withdrawn, unable to have equal relations with adults and hence prey on children," says Mehta. They usually team up with 'friends', mastermind criminal acts through them, get hooked to obsessive behaviour, namely sex and substance abuse, and show very little remorse or guilt as they navigate through life.

Manoj is a perfect case study: He was busy making love to his wife, with his mobile phone playing out a porn clip, when the police barged into his in-law's home in Chiknauta village of Muzaffarpur, Bihar, at midnight on April 19. "Who is this Manoj you are looking for," he challenged. "I am Sanjay Kumar." A smart move, except that the Delhi street language he picked up, "Oye," gave him away. Manoj had easily slipped into the teeming anonymity of poverty in big-city Delhi, renting a dingy, paan-stained basement room for Rs 400 a month in the three-storey building where Gudiya lived. It was a lifestyle that spun around the stifling heat of the factory floor, casual friends, bottles of cheap country liquor, small-time violence and incessant porn-watching on the mobile phone. Manoj did not think he would get caught: Like a good son-in-law, he had brought fruits and mutton for his in-laws after enjoying a sumptuous dinner and frolicking in a village fair.

Young schoolgirls protest against the rape of a five-year-old in Delhi

Child abusers wear a mask of conformity and plan their strategies to win trust and deflect attention from their secret. Children usually feel safe with them. Home is the central locale of sexual abuse, with 90 per cent of sexual molestation, from fondling to rape, being carried out by a person the child knows. Rarely are abusers complete strangers. "On her way to school" is a phrase that comes up repeatedly, as children-especially the last child to be dropped home-get abused during unsupervised bus or car rides to and from school. Cases of girls being picked up by neighbourhood boys on way to school and getting gang raped in moving cars, is yet another scenario. Rape on school premises is also extremely common in India. "A child is most vulnerable where there is trust and affection," says Delhi-based psychologist Dr Jitendra Nagpal. "It's the familiarity that proves lethal, with parents often refusing to believe the child."

It's a process called 'grooming', points out Vidya Reddy, director of Tulir-Centre for Prevention and Healing of Child Sexual Abuse in Chennai. "It's a protracted system by which a child abuser plays mind-games with a child," she says. They start getting involved in a child's daily life. They win over a child's trust with treats, gifts or rides, play with them, engage the parents-only to perform the desired sex act. Predators tend to target lonely children, perhaps unloved, with family problems, or unsupervised, she explains. "So when the abuse occurs, a child gets confused, feels complicit, guilty and often stays silent."

It's worse in a society in transition. Ask Dr T.D. Dogra, the head of forensic medicine at aiims. "In my 42 years at aiims, child rape cases came to us only occasionally," he says. "But now a range of cases has started to come where children show grievous injuries." He recalls a case three years ago where his team suspected 'sexual asphyxia', or constriction of the neck for sexual gratification. "That is a very uncommon crime in India but quite common in Western forensic literature." Dogra believes the new type of crimes on children indicates a changing society where community ties have collapsed and family cohesion has suffered. "Most such cases come to us from the lower strata of society," he says. "Perhaps, a lot more people from that strata are on the move, migrating, separated from family and starved of sexual affection and contact."

Social scientists, too, tell the story of Two Indias. "The widening gap between disquieting poverty in the midst of India's new plenty is the greatest threat to the nation's well-being," says sociologist Manas Ray of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata. Since the 1990s, India has told a stunning growth story. But it also has the world's largest urban population living below poverty line. Migration in India has been historically low, mostly because of caste, kinship and community ties, he explains. But with saturated employment opportunities in rural India, a large numbers of young people are moving from villages to cities. In 1951, the urban population in India was 62 million people, 17 per cent of the total population. By 2011, it was 377 million, or 31 per cent. Cities are magnets for the poor looking for better opportunities. They end up inhabiting hidden depths within the urban space. "The rise in rape can be partly interpreted as the anger of the urban poor. Children and women are easy targets. And rape has always been a tool of war," says Ray.

"The bottom line for child rapists is power," says psychiatrist Dr Aniruddha Deb of Kolkata: "Here is a man who is weak, carries a deep sense of inadequacy, has a complete disregard for the feelings and rights of others and harbours self-anger that is reflected outwards." Molesting or raping a child to them is more a control and power issue, he explains, than sexual gratification. "And they are all around us and have always been." So be aware and be on your guard about children of any age with anybody, he warns; talk to children about safe and unsafe touching; teach them personal safety, age-appropriate information, skills and self-esteem; tell them that their body belongs to them and nobody has the right to touch them in any which way they don't like or understand.

Streets have no names in East Delhi's Gandhi Nagar. Teeming with carts, rickshaws, cows and people, here the lanes and alleys simply merge into each other. In an old, musty building, Gudiya was left to die, with parts of a bottle and three candle sticks inside her. But with the help of doctors, she is well on the way to recovery and about to return to that so-called safe haven called 'home'. Will she run and play like she did before? Will she again trip up and down the stairs past the room where she had lain soaked in her own blood? Will she ever heal her past? Will she ever trust anyone? The nation has lost its innocence with her. Will India remember not to forget its many Gudiyas?